


Every Selfish Trip

by sammyatstanford



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Pre-Series, Stanford Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-03
Updated: 2014-02-03
Packaged: 2018-01-11 00:43:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1166571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sammyatstanford/pseuds/sammyatstanford
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean don’t know it, will never know it, but until Sam breaks down and picks up the phone, they live as dark reflections.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Selfish Trip

Sam spends his first night at Stanford on a bare mattress, a sheet pulled up over his shoulders and smelling like Dean’s soap and deodorant because Sam hadn’t made sure the sheets he grabbed from their haphazard collection while hastily packing were actually clean.  He only has the one set, and one pillow and one pillowcase that he carried tucked under his arm from the bus stop because it didn’t fit in his duffel. But when he goes to make the bed, he discovers it’s a twin-XL and his stolen sheets are useless and he’ll have to find the money to buy something anyway.

Sam spends his first night at Stanford with his knees up by his chin because this bed has a footboard, which he’s not used to after years of motel beds and mattresses on the floor of cheap apartments. He is used to not fitting, but he’s also used to beds where his long legs can stretch and his feet can hang off the end. It takes Sam a few days to see into someone else’s dorm room and figure out that the mattress frame can be lofted up to rest at the top of the headboard and footboard. It makes him feel perilously high, but it’s better than being cramped so he deals with it.

Sam spends his first night at Stanford unable to sleep because his room is on the side of the building furthest from any roads and he can’t hear the cars driving by. His roommate hasn’t moved in yet and there’s no one breathing in the bed next to him, and it’s so quiet he can hear the air moving in his lungs and the pulse beating in his neck. Eventually he puts the sole pillow over his head, his cheek pressed against the scratchy fabric of the mattress, because at least then it seems like the lack of sound is something intentional.

Sam spends his first night at Stanford ignoring the tears on his cheeks. He ignores the wet splash on the mattress in the morning, covers it with his pillow, and gets dressed for Orientation.

 

***

 

Dean spends Sam’s first morning at Stanford praying to the porcelain gods.

 

***

 

Sam is sort of overwhelmed by freshman orientation, but sort of not. He’s been to enough new schools that being surrounded by new people and not having anything to say or any idea what’s going on doesn’t really phase him. He’s read all the information they sent him (well the stuff he actually managed to get in the mail) obsessively as he dreamed of being here over the summer, so he’s got the gist of the situation and knows what to expect. But he’s never been to school knowing he’s going to be staying with the same people for the next four years of his life. This, Sam knows, is his opportunity. The chance he never fucking had with Dad moving them from place to place all the time. The chance to make real friends besides his brother and have connections to someone besides his brother, who obviously didn’t care enough to stop Dad throwing him out for good. His chance to be remembered.

Lunch on the first day is set up on folding tables out on one of the quads. A lot of people’s families are still around, so most of the other freshmen are sitting with moms and dads and brothers or sisters. Sam takes his charred hamburger and sits at an empty table in the shade, and he must not look too forbidding, or there must be a limited number of seats, because eventually the table fills up around him.

One of the girls at his table – Emily, her name tag says, from Los Angeles, California – asks him about Lawrence, Kansas, because that’s what he had listed as his hometown on his application materials and that’s what they had put under his name.

“I don’t really know,” he says, “we left when I was a baby.” And the girl wrinkles her nose and asks, “Well where are you from?” and Sam shrugs and says, “We moved around a lot,” and the girl’s mom smiles and asks, “Ah, military?” and Sam replies awkwardly, “No” and they’re all looking at him a little strange. This is the moment when Sam realizes that anything he _could_ say about himself, he _can’t_ say about himself, and he better start putting his extensive set of lying skills to use because he can’t be honest about a single thing in his life. Hell, his dad and brother are wanted in a handful of states for all manner of crimes, so can he even be honest about them?

“My, uh, my dad, he was a salesman, and he brought us with him a lot, so...yeah,” Sam says, and it sounds completely stilted and fake, but Emily’s family doesn’t look like they know he’s lying. They look like he’s something pitiable, and that’s worse.

Sam spends the rest of his afternoon paying only half attention to the speakers and making a bulleted list of facts about his new old life on the back of one of the handouts.

 

***

 

In the twenty-three days since Sam left, Dean has fucked fourteen different girls, bought weed from six shady ass teenagers outside of Wal-Marts or Pizza Huts, and drunk so much he wasn’t sure how he got home eleven times. Dean really hopes Dad stops drinking, cuts out the aimless drifting from town to town, and finds them a hunt soon, because he thinks his liver is starting to pickle.

He holds his cell phone in his hand for at least an hour a day, but he doesn’t do anything with it.

 

***

 

Sam is taking three classes he chose and one that’s required for freshmen. He doesn’t really know what he wants to major in. He’s thought about going into law, so he signs up for an intro class to philosophy and one for political science. He rounds it off with creative writing, because he has to take something in English according to the advisor he met during Orientation, and he figures he can just write stories about his life and pass them off as fiction. Maybe next quarter he’ll take calculus; he’s always liked math.

Maybe next quarter, he’ll have a friend to take a class with.

 

***

 

Dean keeps turning to the passenger seat to tell Sam something funny, but his laughter makes a hollow echo in the empty car. The hollowness bounces under his ribs and pools with the hot burn of anger and resentment and betrayal. He’s never punched his baby’s steering wheel so often in such a short time.

He stops laughing so much.

 

***

 

Sam thinks that if people knew about the quality of his fake IDs, he’d probably have a lot more friends. He’s picked one of the three he took with him to school to use at the liquor store, and it’s sort of strange that he has to remember to use the same ID every time now. The guy behind the counter thinks his name is Cliff Burton. Sam guesses he’s not a big Metallica fan.

Sam doesn’t drink every night or anything. Just when he feels so lonely that it’s like a physical pain in his chest, something cold and sharp like the knife he can’t stop keeping under his pillow. Just when the nightmares still consume him, and he wakes up panting and choking and there’s no one a bed over in a faded black t-shirt to put warm hands on his shoulders and ground him back in reality. The nightmares for the first two weeks are so bad that he finally breaks down and puts a line of rock salt around the border of his mattress frame, since he can’t exactly salt the windows and doors, and carves protective symbols into the bottom of his bed posts, where his RA won’t see them when he moves out at the end of the school year. He figures just because he’s done with hunting, done with the supernatural forever, he doesn’t have to ignore everything he knows is true.

Of course, all the protections don’t help much when he’s dreaming about Dean dying with no one there to watch his six.

 

***

 

Dad sends Dean on his first solo hunt since Sam left, a quick salt and burn outside Ames with an obvious culprit and bones to burn in a clearly-marked grave. It should be no problem, but Dean hasn’t slept in three days and he doesn’t know why. Before he can get the matches lit, he ends up slammed into the headstone so hard that he thinks his cheekbone might be broken.

He toasts the spirit, but after he brushes his teeth that night he spits one of his molars into the sink.

 

***

 

Sam’s work study money goes into paying his tuition, so he grabs the CalTrain to San Francisco and hustles pool in bars every once in a while for spending cash. He uses some of it to buy a couple of posters for his walls and a comforter because his roommate likes to keep the room too cold even for Sam, who has always been too hot but then has primarily lived in places with shitty air conditioning so he’s gotten used to always being too hot and in fact kind of likes it at this point. But Sam now lives in the overpriced hoodie he bought at the bookstore and the patched-up jacket he brought with him.

He’s actually gotten a few compliments on the jacket; people think the patches are there for style, not because some monster tore at the fabric trying to tear at his flesh but the jacket wasn’t so damaged that it was worth buying a new one.

 

***

 

Dean’s fine when he’s hunting. He’s got something to focus on, and he’s gotten in the habit of working himself so hard or so long that he’s so exhausted by the time he makes it back to the motel, he can fall asleep watching bad TV or after only a beer or two. And he’s fine when he’s got Dad around, because there’s someone to talk to, even if that person doesn’t really talk _to_ him so much as _at_ him half the time. And he’s fine when he’s at a bar, smiling at Amber in the low cut top and short shorts, because even if he’ll never stay until the next morning, he’s got companionship for a few hours.

But when Dad’s gone, Dean sort of goes off the rails. He gets too drunk in his motel room to make it out for the night. He hustles pool to get cash to spend on booze. He doesn’t even take girls back to his bed because something still nags at him, the sense memory of all those times that Dad being gone meant Sam waiting for him and he’d never been such an asshole big brother that he’d bring home some chick when Sam was sleeping in the next bed.

So, when for the fourth time in four months Dad goes off on his own with a flimsy explanation about his own hunt and some salt and burn for Dean to “take care of,” Dean follows him. They’re in Utah, and he follows John’s truck all the way to California, all the way to the exit that reads “Palo Alto.” Dean keeps going down the interstate.

Five minutes later, he pulls over because his hands are shaking too hard to drive. Ten minutes after that, he finds a room and starts drinking whiskey straight from the bottle.

 

***

 

Sometimes, Sam goes stir-crazy in his room or the library, so he’ll go get coffee at the coffee shop where he likes to study or go out to bars when he doesn’t want to drink in the reshall. The bartender at his favorite dive (a twenty minute walk from campus but worth it because it’s a little more low key than the places closer by) thinks his name is Bryan Hitt.

He does go to the bars near campus sometimes, and now that he’s not in Dean’s shadow, a lot of girls even talk to him. But Sam’s never been comfortable with the way Dean likes to take a chick home and never call her again, and he doesn’t really know how to tell what a girl is going for when she comes up to talk to him while he’s completely alone and (he thinks) not very friendly looking at all. Sam doesn’t know what he has to offer these pretty college girls with parents they call in between classes and friends they watch movies with, so he smiles and makes polite conversation until he can’t stand how awkward he feels and he excuses himself for the bathroom and slips out into the back alley. After he shows up to the same bar a few too many times and brushes off all the women who try to talk to him, a few guys try, too. Sam really doesn’t know what to do with that, but he has a feeling Dean wouldn’t be too impressed.

 

***

 

Dean is out one night in Washington when he sees a guy out of the corner of his eye—tall, gangly, shaggy brown hair. He whips around on his stool so fast that he knocks his beer off the counter and onto the sticky floor.

Of course, it’s not Sam. Dean knew it wouldn’t be Sam. Of course.

Because Sam would never come looking for Dean. Because even if Sam did, he’d never be able to find him. Dean always thought they were like parallel lines, moving in perfect tandem, images in a mirror. Now, he knows how right he was. They are parallel—no matter how they move, they will never ever intersect.

Dean hears a rhythmic thumping and looks around, trying to figure out what’s going on, and realizes it’s his heartbeat pounding in his ears. He can’t breathe, feels iron bands tightening around his ribs, feels like every eye is watching him crawl out of his own skin. He stumbles into the bathroom, knowing he’s panicking, hearing the echo of Dad’s advice in his head as he tries to calm himself down.

He splashes cold water on his face, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes and sliding them down to his chin for something rough and real and grounding, until he catches his reflection in the mirror. He’s pale, dark circles smudged under his eyes from how little he sleeps with no one breathing next to him, freckles in sharp relief against his skin.

Sam used to laugh at Dean’s freckles and before that Sam used to wish he had freckles like Dean’s and before that Sam used to try to count Dean’s freckles when Dean turned the light on because Sam had a nightmare and couldn’t sleep.

Dean puts his fist into the mirror but he doesn’t hear the shatter. Just watches pieces of himself fall off the wall and disappear.

 

***

 

Sam and Dean don’t know it, will never know it, but until Sam breaks down and picks up the phone, they live as dark reflections. Dean watches infomercials in empty motel rooms and drinks himself to sleep. Sam watches late-night talk show repeats on the couch in the common area and drinks himself to sleep. Dean fucks his way through small-town America. Sam reads for class and drinks himself to sleep. Dean gets high. Sam writes papers and drinks himself to sleep.

Sam never did have as many vices as his brother.

 

***

 

Dean has a voicemail.

Dean has a voicemail from Sam on the burner phone he always keeps charged in the glove box because it’s the last way he knows that Sam knows to contact him.

Dean’s hands are shaking so badly that he can’t open the phone, so he puts it down, grabs a fifth of Jack from his duffel and takes four long swallows. He picks up the phone again.

He grinds his teeth through the smooth electronic voice telling him he has one new message—he knows, that’s why he’s got the fucking phone pressed so hard to his face that it’s grating against his cheekbone.

“Dean—” Sam’s voice says, and it is definitely slurred with alcohol and desperation, but it’s quiet in the background so he’s not at a bar or some stupid party for college kids. College kids like Sam. “You can’t blame me. You can’t blame me, okay? You just—you can’t. You have to understand. Please don’t blame me. Don’t blame me. Don’t. You can’t. I need you to—you can’t.” The line is quiet for a long minute. Dean can hear Sam breathing shakily into the phone.

“I don’t blame you, either.”

The female voice tells Dean he has no more new messages. Dean squeezes the phone so hard he hears the plastic creak. His thumb hovers over the delete key.

Don’t blame Sam? How can he _not_? Sam walked away, Sam left the family, left everything, left _Dean_. Sam made the choice, it was his fucking choice and he chose every goddamn thing on the planet _except his own brother_. And Sam doesn’t blame Dean? Well fat fucking chance because if Dean had taken better care of Sam and not sided with Dad so many times and made sure Sam actually got to go to fucking junior prom and—and if Dean had just _been better_ then Sam would not fucking _be gone_ so yeah, Sam is a little lying piece of shit in addition to all of the other things he is. Of course he blames Dean. Dean blames Dean. Dad blames Dean. Sam blames Dean. It’s a fucking merry-go-round of blame and Dean’s at the center, and Dean needs to feel as dizzy as the ride he can’t escape, so he shoves the phone under his pillow where he can’t see it and upends the bottle of Jack into his mouth. He doesn’t stop drinking until he’s going to choke on the lack of oxygen.

Dean passes out.

Dean does not delete the voicemail.

 

***

 

Sam is walking to work at the bookstore when he feels his backup phone vibrate in his back pocket. His stomach flips upside down because only two people in the US have that number.

He’s frozen on the path and fumbling with the phone, and there’s a funny humming in his ears as he reads “D” on the call display.

Dean is calling him. He didn’t want Dean to call back because he doesn’t remember what he said. He’d woken up with his phone in his hand, and after he’d thrown up in his trashcan, he’d found one outgoing call to his brother. His brother. The one who never said a word when Dad slammed the door in Sam’s face and threw away the key.

He was _really_ hoping Dean wouldn’t call back.

He should probably not answer because this is exactly the sort of situation voicemail was invented for, right? But his hand is flipping the phone open and bringing it up to his ear without any oversight from the conscious parts of his brain.

“Dean?” he asks, and he is ashamed of how weak his voice sounds.

“Sam,” Dean replies, and his voice doesn’t sound so hot either. Sam is hit by a wave of nauseous worry because what if Dean isn’t calling him back at all? What if something happened and—?

"Is everything okay? Are you hurt? Are you all right?” It punches out of Sam in a single breath.

Dean chuckles low through the phone line. “I’m fine. Everyone’s fine.” Sam realizes he has his fingernails pressed into his cheekbone, and he relaxes. “I just, uh, I got your message, so—“

He doesn’t let his brother finish. “Dean, I’m really sorry about that. I don’t even remember what I said and I—well I’m just really sorry.”

“Crazy party, little bro?” Dean asks. Sam expects to hear a smile, but he must be losing his grip on Dean after only four months apart because he doesn’t detect one.

“Um no, I—something like that,” he settles on, because ‘I got that drunk alone’ isn’t something he’s prepared to admit. “Sorry,” he adds again.

“It’s okay, man,” Dean says, and then, much quieter, “It was uh...it was good to hear from you.”

“Yeah, okay. I’m—I’m glad.” There is a long pause. “Thanks for calling me back.”

“Sure, Sam. Woulda called before but I wasn’t sure if—well, anyway, you can call me whenever, don’t even have to be drunk.” Dean’s laugh sounds forced, but Sam smiles all the same because Dean is just— _Dean_.

“Yeah, okay. Listen, I gotta go, I’m on my way to work but...but I’ll call you sometime, okay?”

“Got a job, Sam?” Dean asks, and Sam’s surprised because he didn’t think Dean would really care about what he was doing in California.

“Just work study, part of my scholarship.”

“Ah. Okay, well yeah, hit me back some time. I’ll, uh, I’ll talk to you then.”

“Bye, Dean.”

“Bye, Sammy,” and of course he says it at the end of the conversation when Sam can’t correct him. The phone beeps in his ear to let him know the call cut out.

 

***

 

Dean salts and burns and slices and shoots and drinks and fucks and all the good stuff in life, but now when he does it his phone doesn’t feel like a brick in his pocket.

 

***

 

Spring quarter is better for Sam. He meets a guy in his calculus class named Tyson Brady (“call me Brady”) and they work on problem sets together. They don’t do anything outside of class, but they say hi when they pass each other on campus. Brady is kind of cocky in a way that reminds Sam a little of Dean, but it’s the sort of cockiness that comes from growing up with a lot of money and never being told no by parents who love you and friends who worship the theatre and ping pong table in your basement, so it’s not much like Dean at all. Sam sincerely doubts Brady could headshot a moving target with a handgun and save someone’s life. But he’s a nice guy, planning to be a doctor, so Sam is happy to hang out with him in the library a few times a week, even if he can’t tell him anything true about his life. And then when summer hits and they’re both staying in town, they do start hanging out together, going to bars and movies and playing video games, and Brady introduces Sam to a few people he knows, and just like that Sam’s got friends.

And he’s talking to Dean, maybe once every few weeks, usually just for a few minutes and mostly through voicemails, but it’s good. Talking to Dean means he can stop dreaming about Dean and Dad dying without him there, without anyone knowing to tell him something happened, having to hear it second or third hand from Caleb or Pastor Jim after the body is burned and there’s no one to say goodbye to.

 

***

 

Dean still hunts with Dad most of the time, but he’s getting better and better at going solo. He feels this sort of pang when he realizes it after sending a demon the long way back home. He’s becoming like so many other hunters now, working alone and only meeting friends here and there along the way. Dean never really imagined his life turning out that way. Always figured he’d have a partner.

He picks up the phone to call Sam—bagging a demon on his own is a pretty fuckin’ big deal—but he hangs up before it starts ringing. Because as much as Sam is the first one he wants to brag to about this sorta thing, this sorta thing is not the sorta things that he and Sam talk about.

He doesn’t talk to Sam about much of anything, really, because the thought of asking Sam about school and work and the life he abandoned his _family_ for makes anger writhe hot and sharp in Dean’s gut. And it must be enough for Sam to know that Dean is still breathing, because beyond a tight “you better be okay” on Dean’s voicemail if it’s been a while since he checked in, Sam doesn’t ask anything about hunting or talk about the things only they know about. Dean wonders if it eats Sam up inside sometimes, this burning knowledge that he can’t share with anyone else and refuses to acknowledge with the people he can. Sam always did have to tell everyone every little scrap of useless bullshit he absorbed into his massive genius brain. Dean wonders how he manages.

Dean doesn’t even know if Sam salts his doors, but he hopes real hard that even his stubborn ass little brother isn’t _that_ stupid. At least Sam’s only drunk in half the voicemails he leaves for Dean now. He always gave Sammy a hard time when he was a kid, but hearing Sam turn into such a partier after everything he put into getting into college sort of bums Dean out. There are some of his footsteps he never wanted Sam to follow in.

 

***

 

Sam gets a call from Dean late in October of his third semester. It’s still so warm in Palo Alto that he’s wearing a t-shirt, some threadbare hand-me-down from Dean with Pantera splashed on the front in barely-readable letters.

“Hey,” he says, sticking a pencil in his book to mark the page and turning around on the picnic table bench he’s sitting at to stretch out his legs.

“Sam, hey,” Dean replies. He sounds rushed and Sam tenses up immediately. But before he can ask, Dean says, “I hate to ask, man, but I need a favor. I’m hunting some Malay spirit called a Bajang, but I think it’s shape-shifting and I need you to...”

Sam doesn’t hear the rest of what Dean’s saying because the anger is a molten _whush_ across his eardrums. “No, Dean,” he says, cutting off Dean’s bullshit. “No fucking way. I can’t fucking believe this.”

“What the hell, Sam?” his brother responds, and it’s barbed with acid and disbelief and Sam _cannot fucking believe this_.

"I told you, I fucking told you, you _asshole_ ,” he spits back into the phone, “I’m fucking _done_ , Dean. I’m done, I’m out. This is the only fucking thing I wanted, Dean, to be _done_ and you’re just—just trying to drag me back in because you can’t take the time to—to—to research or ask D—Dad or call a hunter, but I’m not fucking going there and you damn well can’t make me. You’re just like Dad, exact same fucking story.”

And when Dean growls back “Are you fucking kidding me?” Sam can’t remember the last time he sounded so pissed off. “It’s killing kids, you worthless— _kids_. But you know what, Sam? What the fuck ever because Sam and his goddamn picket fence minivan fucking life is too busy reading about the fucking fall of Rome to—goddamnit Sam you don’t even give a shit if I _die_ , do you? I’m alone here and you just leave me hanging out to dry? God man you are so fucked up, it’s unreal.”

And Sam says, “Fuck you, Dean, you don’t know a goddamn thing about it, you—“

And Dean says, “Never fucking call me again” and the line goes dead and Sam gets up and throws everything off of the picnic table and snaps his phone in half because fine, if Dean doesn’t ever want to hear from him again then _fine_ he just officially lost the only working number he had for Sam and he will never be able to call Sam and attempt to ruin everything he’s spent the last year and half creating ever ever again.

Sam stands there, panting, until the burst of adrenaline recedes and he is shaking with the aftereffects, his knees wobbling out from under him as he falls into the grass. His face is in his hands and he can feel the breaths sucking into and shoving out of his lungs.

 _Dean_.

Sam doesn’t know how long he stays that way, but when his other cell phone rings, a dozen feet away where it landed in the grass when it got thrown with all of his other belongings, he half crawls, half stumbles over to it, his brain buzzing with rage and regret and loss and need.

The call display reads ‘Brady.'

Because Dean doesn’t have this number.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is based on my extensive headcanons about the Stanford Era of Supernatural we know so little about. Not everything made it in, but a lot did. It always seemed strange to me that someone whose whole life was about keeping secrets would make these close friends and be so willing to open up to other people, even as he kept lying to them, so I have always felt that Sam needed a triggering event to make him vulnerable to demon!Brady and getting set up with Jess. Also I feel like Sam never learned appropriate coping mechanisms until he met Jess - how could he, really, the way he was raised. So Sam participates in a lot of Winchester coping during his first year in California.
> 
> Thanks for reading, and to Kara, for encouraging me to write this!
> 
> Title from "Lean," by Jimmy Eat World.


End file.
